Barry Wellman, FRSC is a Canadian-American sociologist and is currently the director of NetLab at the Faculty of Information (iSchool) of theUniversity of Toronto. His areas of research are communitysociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books.

Among the concepts Wellman has published are: "network of networks" and "the network city" (both with Paul Craven), "the community question", "computer networks as social networks", "connected lives" and the "immanent Internet" (both with Bernie Hogan), "media-multiplexity" (with Caroline Haythornthwaite), "networked individualism" and "networked society", "personal community" and "personal network" and three with Anabel Quan-Haase: "hyperconnectivity", "local virtuality" and "virtual locality".

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman are co-authors of the 2012 prize-winning Networked: The New Social Operating System (MIT Press). Wellman is also the editor of three books, and the author of more than 200 articles, often written with students. His ErdÅ‘s number is 3.

Wellman has received career achievement awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, the International Network for Social Network Analysis, the International Communication Association, and two sections of the American Sociological Association: Community and Urban Sociology; Communication and Information Technologies. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2007. In 2012, Wellman was identified as having the highest h-index (of citations) of all Canadian sociologists. Wellman was a faculty member at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013.